I'll once again chime in that Open Grave has a lot of stat/crunch sort of stuff for this setting, and it's clear that the author still had Ravenloft on the brain. There's some decent fluff here and there as well. Just FYI.

Originally Posted by Mesh Hong

...everything Mesh Hong said...

Wow. You have some great suggestions. I'm impressed - these all seem like good mechanics. I like the disease track implementation as well.

Look, if Joe the Barbarian sees the walking corpse of his grandmother, and is forced to kill it, yeah, that should effect his sanity a little bit; but the next time he faces off against a similar threat, it should have little or no effect.

Sure, some characters are going to be scaredy-cats any way you look at them; but eventually there will come a point where fear is subsided intot he mundane.

In other words: unless the experience is mind-shattering, this is just going to be an extra DC. Nobody needs an extra DC. Nobody wants a character going nuts when he has to fight his first goblin horde.

so, not to sound persnickety, (because i'd like to see this make sense, be viable, etc):

is there a way to demonstrate the slow unravelling of the mind, the instantaneous implosion of the mind, basic emotional fear, and plain-and-simple revulsion-- all from one unified, simple set of rules?

no. there isn't. fear can be accounted for by fear-inducing abilities, horror is situational, and madness is character-to-character.

Look, if Joe the Barbarian sees the walking corpse of his grandmother, and is forced to kill it, yeah, that should effect his sanity a little bit; but the next time he faces off against a similar threat, it should have little or no effect.

Sure, some characters are going to be scaredy-cats any way you look at them; but eventually there will come a point where fear is subsided intot he mundane.

Yes I agree. In fact I whole-heartedly agree if this was a standard D&D campaign. But the original poster was interested in comming up with a system for a Ravenloft campaign which has a totally different feel to a standard game (in the original posters opinion).

I think even with additional rules you could only use them in the context of your own game, you would need the players onboard 100% or else any rules would feel heady handed and arbitary. Even then you would have to design them into each specific situation, and keep it all within the context of everything that the PCs have experienced before.

This is something I don't think I would ever do myself. If I want to run a horror games I would stick to Call of Cthuluth where everyone understands exactly what they are getting into.